Personally, I would have chosen the primary codecs differently, but... so be it.

Since it's not practical for WinAmp to be included in the main list and use Lame as an anchor, I gotta go with Lame even though it's not AAC and this is an aac test.

Lame is the one single codec that 'everybody' knows an can relate to. It puts everything else into perspective.

Of course, you will end up having lame re-compete against the aac winner in the multi-format test, but that just means that test should be a bit easier since they'll already be familiar with them.

And that does mean that a very very major AAC distribution won't be tested. WinAmp's AAC will likely be distributed more than iTunes, Nero, and Real combined.... And it wouldn't get tested.... But in spite of that, I still think Lame in there would allow everybody to actually relate the testing of all the AAC codecs to what they already know. Not just the winning codec.

I haven't been following all of these posts, but I assume the Winamp AAC encoder will be fixed before the test. Or there isn't a problem with it after all?

bond, this aint about audio encodes for video, lol j/k... i would like to see winamp in this one, we already know aac is more efficient than mp3 in a lower bitrate. Lets prove the sixpacks that there is something else out there to encode AACs with rather than winamp. By this i mean, i hardly believe winamp's AAC will beat the others much more tunned and developed

Winamp. It deserves to be in this test based on the user-mass, and the long time it's been available. I've used Winamp since 0.x/1.0 beta versions, and it was the thing that really introduced me to audio compression, so i really appreciate it still, even though there are much more choices of players nowadays..

Wow, looks like we'll have a lot of participants in this test. Almost 40 votes for Winamp so far, and I assume every single one of those who voted for it is ready to sit through ABXing 12 samples on 6 near-transparency codecs. Because it would be rather cynical to demand that from others but refusing to do it yourself, wouldn't it?

Ironically, I believe a great deal of the Winamp voters (or voters in general) will not participate. They vote for Winamp because they are just interested on how it would perform and let the others do the hard work.